Maintenance Retirement Quotes

this case it's sensible to develop a skill to just before the point that it begins to require maintenance, continued practice--beyond this point, replacing skill and time with capital assets makes more sense.

277. Providence personnelle. Il existe un certain point supérieur de la vie : lorsque nous l’avons atteint, malgré notre liberté et quoi que nous déniions au beau chaos de l’existence toute raison prévoyante et toute bonté, nous sommes encore une fois en grand danger de servitude intellectuelle et nous avons à faire nos preuves les plus difficiles. Car c’est maintenant seulement que notre esprit est violemment envahi par l’idée d’une providence personnelle, une idée qui a pour elle le meilleur avocat, l’apparence évidente, maintenant que nous pouvons constater que toutes, toutes choses qui nous frappent, tournent toujours à notre bien. La vie de chaque jour et de chaque heure semble vouloir démontrer cela toujours à nouveau ; que ce soit n’importe quoi, le beau comme le mauvais temps, la perte d’un ami, une maladie, une calomnie, la non-arrivée d’une lettre, un pied foulé, un regard jeté dans un magasin, un argument qu’on vous oppose, le fait d’ouvrir un livre, un rêve, une fraude : tout cela nous apparaît, immédiatement, ou peu de temps après, comme quelque chose qui « ne pouvait pas manquer », — quelque chose qui est plein de sens et d’une profonde utilité, précisément pour nous ! Y a-t-il une plus dangereuse séduction que de retirer sa foi aux dieux d’Épicure, ces insouciants inconnus, pour croire à une divinité quelconque, soucieuse et mesquine, qui connaît personnellement chaque petit cheveu sur notre tête et que les services les plus détestables ne dégoûtent point ? Eh bien ! — je veux dire malgré tout cela, — laissons en repos les dieux et aussi les génies serviables, pour nous contenter d’admettre que maintenant notre habileté, pratique et théorique, à interpréter et à arranger les événements atteint son apogée. Ne pensons pas non plus trop de bien de cette dextérité de notre sagesse, si nous sommes parfois surpris de la merveilleuse harmonie que produit le jeu sur notre instrument : une harmonie trop belle pour que nous osions nous l’attribuer à nous-mêmes. En effet, de-ci de-là, il y a quelqu’un qui se joue de nous — le cher hasard : à l’occasion, il nous conduit la main et la providence la plus sage ne saurait imaginer de musique plus belle que celle qui réussit alors sous notre folle main.

The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming . . . in other words, living. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.

L'apparition du pantalon dans les Principautés [roumaines], comme toute chose destinée à changer les sociétés, fut d'abord honteuse, décriée, huée et raillée. Le tout premier Roumain qui a changé ses habits pour un frac et un chapeau haut de forme est longtemps passé, auprès des cours de Iași et de Bucarest pour un excentrique ou pour ce qu'on appelle maintenant un « clown ». Les intendants des domaines rigolaient, les valets et les Tziganes étaient gênés de retirer leur chapeau devant une queue de pie et les boyards en caressant leurs grandes barbes touffues selon rang et fonction criaient avec beaucoup d'humour : « Hé, l'Allemand… ! » En hivers les chenapans accostaient les porteurs de vestons dans la rue par des remarques du genre : « Chaud, chaud messieurs ? », et par d'autres mots d'esprit très en vogue à l'époque. Les boyards et les dames se tordaient de rire. […] Personne ne se doutait en ce jour-là qu'une grande bourrasque traversait la Moldavie, bouleversant ses vieilles habitudes… Aujourd'hui des anciens habits ne reste qu'un souvenir, dont on s'étonne quand on les aperçoit parfois au théâtre. (traduit du roumain par Mălina Sgondea Vuillet)

Most homeowners want to keep their property nice, so they spend excessively on maintenance.

while developed-world factory workers worry about the threat of lower-wage Asian and immigrant workers . . . the bigger threat there, to both, is robots! They don’t have emotional problems, and they don’t need healthcare and retirement benefits, just a little maintenance. And then there’s the EVEN greater threat of the automation of left-brain tasks in the office, including many higher professional skills. We ultimately have to become creative, right-brain-oriented entrepreneurial workers who create more customized products and services, delivered in real time . . . to compete with computers that do as much for simple and complex left-brain tasks.

The MTA had limited flexibility to cut its expenses. The subways had very high fixed costs and the Transit Authority needed to provide enough services for the four-hour peak commuting period. While a private business would have tried to replace full-time workers with part-time workers or scaled back salaries and benefits, those were not feasible options for a state-run enterprise whose workers were politically influential. Instead, a new union contract in 1968 allowed transit workers to retire with half pay after twenty years of work, exacerbating the MTA’s financial problems and affecting service quality after most of the car maintenance workers and 40 percent of the electrical workers retired in the next two years.75 With

Making a decision to own a house that is too expensive in lieu of starting an investment portfolio impacts an individual in at least the following three ways: 1.​Loss of time, during which other assets could have grown in value. 2.​Loss of additional capital, which could have been invested instead of paying high home maintenance expenses. 3.​Loss of education. Too often, people count their house and savings and retirement plans as all they have in their asset column. Because they have no money to invest, they simply don’t invest. This costs them investment experience. Most never become what the investment world calls “a sophisticated investor.” And the best investments are usually first sold to sophisticated investors, who then turn around and sell them to the people playing it safe.

Some of Becker’s most compelling research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew—although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element. Years later, the economists Doug Bernheim, Andrei Shleifer , and Larry Summers empirically demonstrated Becker’s point. Using data from a U.S. government longitudinal study, they showed that an elderly parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance. But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents? A reasonable conjecture—in which case you’d expect an only child of wealthy parents to be especially dutiful. But the data show no increase in retirement-home visits if a wealthy family has only one grown child; there need to be at least two. This suggests that the visits increase because of competition between siblings for the parent’s estate. What might look like good old-fashioned intrafamilial altruism may be a sort of prepaid inheritance tax. Some governments, wise to the ways of the world, have gone so far as to legally require grown children to visit or support their aging moms and dads. In Singapore, the law is known as the Maintenance of Parents Act. Still, people appear to be extraordinarily altruistic, and not just within their own families.

But I have been stressing that there are other underlying species-regularities involved. First, that women leaders do not inspire ‘followership’ chiefly because they are women and not only because of the consequences of those factors noted above ; secondly, even if they want to, women cannot become political leaders because males are strongly predisposed to form and maintain all-male groups, particularly when matters of moment for the community are involved. The suggestion is that a combination of these two factors has been the basis for the hostility and difficulty those females have faced who have aspired to political leadership. This has been the basis of the tradition of female non-involvement in high politics, and not the tradition itself. Cultural forms originally express the underlying ‘genetically programmed behavioural propensities’. In their turn, such cultural forms maintain – as tradition – an enduring solution to the recurrent problem of assigning of leadership and followership roles. In this connection, Margaret Mead writes about ‘zoomorphizing Man’. ‘Culture in the sense of man's species-characteristic method of meeting problems of maintenance, transformation, and transcendance of the past is an abstraction from our observations on particular cultures.’? This is then another way of looking at how broad political patterns may predictably emerge from the more detailed and programmed patterns of different behaviour of males and females. Some females may indeed penetrate some high councils. They become ministers of governments, ambassadors, and so on. A few may receive assignments which are not ‘feminine’ in their implication, such as Golda Meir, former Israeli Foreign Minister, and Barbara Castle, U.K. Secretary of Productivity and Employment. It is important to know what happens to the ‘backroom boys’ under such circumstances. Do they retire to an even more secluded chamber? Does the lady become ‘one of the boys’?

The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: 1. Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. 2. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. 3. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. 4. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming … in other words, living. 5. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. 6. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. 7. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. 8. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. 9. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. 10. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.

Maintenant qu'ils ont rempli leur mission historique qui était d'amener la bourgeoisie au pouvoir, ils sont fermement invités à se retirer afin que la bourgeoisie puisse calmement remplir sa propre mission. Or, nous avons vu que la bourgeoisie nationale des pays sous-developpés est incapable de remplir une quelconque mission. Au bout de quelques années, la désagrégation du parti devient manifeste et tout observateur, même superficiel, peut se rendre compte que l'ancien parti, devenu aujourd'hui squelettique, ne sert qu'à immobiliser le peuple. Le parti, qui pendant le combat avait attiré à lui l'ensemble de la nation, se décompose. Les intellectuels , qui à la veille de l'indépendance avaient rallié le parti, confirment par leur comportement actuel que ce ralliement n'avait d'autre but que de participer à la distribution du gâteau de l'indépendance. Le parti devient un moyen de réussite individuelle.

-Je pense à ce qui me reste à faire. Cette journée sera mon dernier exercice littéraire Peut-il, à l'instar de nos anciens maîtres polir chaque mot et chaque situation ou laisser libre cours à l'inspiration, au chaos de la spontanéité sans complexes ? Non, ma chérie, je plaisantais En réalité, je ne pense qu'à toi. Ce matin j'ai connu une fille russe poète et légèrement cinglée, et maintenant... -Oui, et maintenant ? -Maintenant, je suis assis en compagnie de la femme de ma vie. Es-tu la femme de ma vie? -Oui. -Même si c'est un peu banal? -Tant pis. -C'est vraiment accablant, tout se ramène à quelques mots du monologue d'Hamlet | Tant de siècles passés, tant de civilisations mortes, tant de générations tombées dans l'oubli, et rien n'a changé ou si peu. Cette maudite Providence nous retire jusqu'à l'illusion de l'originalité, elle fait de nous d'éternels plaglaires. p260